Rice has always been part of a normal Filipino diet. Filipinos can’t live without rice. We eat our viands or what we call ‘ulam’ with rice. We make pastries and other dishes with it. It has always been part of our meals—breakfast, lunch and dinner, even for snacks. It is a tragedy to have bread but not have rice at all. We practically live for rice.
Some local fast food chains have even included this great fascination for rice in their menus and promos. A number of stores came up with rice unlimited deals just to target this phenomenon. Eating rice is for everyone, up, middle and lower class alike. Rice being included in the Filipino diet is like a shared experience where no one is above anyone else. Eating rice, I must say, is like creating an authentic Filipino in you.
Being a top staple food in our country, one would think that the rice industry is a booming economy. But sad to say, it is considered a slowly dying industry. The Philippines is an agricultural country and rice is our top agricultural product. A lot of Filipinos have relied their sole living in planting rice. Most of them have known nothing else than planting rice.
I have witnessed how struggling planting rice can be in my grandmother’s farm, as most of our farmers still do the old ways of planting rice unlike what I see on TV how other developed countries do it. Enduring the painstaking planting of the rice seedling on the knee-deep mud one by one while being under the scorching heat of the sun and waiting until the right season comes for harvest, wishing with all the gods that weather conditions acted on your favor the whole time—every grain of rice is totally hardwork.
Rice as it is being planted and being eaten is a communal activity that all Filipinos partake. Rice is not just a part of an ordinary Filipino meal. It paints a picture of who we are as a country—united by our great penchant of rice, whether eating it or solely relying our lives on it.
